The Information · Gemini · Google · Open Source · Anthropic · OpenAI · MIT Technology Review
AI researchers and online privacy experts have long warned of the myriad dangers generative AI poses for personal privacy
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Experts say that these privacy lapses are most likely due to personally identifiable information (PII) being used in training data, though it’s hard to understand the exact mechanism causing real phone numbers to show up in the AI-generated responses.
Key facts
- Specifically, 55% of these concerns about generative AI reference ChatGPT, 20% reference Gemini, 15% Claude, and 10% other AI tools, Shavell says
- This aligns with what happened to Daniel Abraham, a 28-year-old software engineer in Israel
- According to the California data broker registry, for instance, 31 of 578 registered data brokers operating in the state self-reported that they had “shared or sold consumers’ data to a developer of a GenAI system or model in the past year
- Ideally, individual consumers should be able to request that their PII be removed, says Jennifer King, the privacy and data fellow at Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial
Summary
People report that their personal contact info was surfaced by Google AI—and there’s apparently no easy way to prevent it. A Redditor recently wrote that he was “desperate for help”: for about a month, he said, his phone had been inundated by calls from “strangers” who were “looking for a lawyer, a product designer, a locksmith.” Callers were apparently misdirected by Google’s generative AI. In March, a software developer in Israel was contacted on WhatsApp after Google’s chatbot Gemini provided incorrect customer service instructions that included his number. And in April, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington was messing around on Gemini and got it to cough up her colleague’s personal cell phone number. AI researchers and online privacy experts have long warned of the myriad dangers generative AI poses for personal privacy.